About 40 businesspeople and others interested in product design and innovation got some inexpensive advice from two experts at a Great Lakes Biomimicry event held Wednesday, June 14, at the Ohio Aerospace Institute in Cleveland.
For $10, they got to hear how innovation is done by John Nottingham and Brent Duersch.
Nottingham is co-founder and co-CEO of the Cleveland design firm Nottingham Spirk. Duersch is managing director of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub in Cleveland, a collaboration between Nottingham's company and the EY accounting and consulting firm where the two men often work together.
The two busted some myths about what really fosters innovation and creativity. Yes, it might require some freewheeling brainstorming, but it also requires lot of structure and discipline to bring ideas to reality, they said.
But what might have been most interesting was the somewhat formulaic approach they said they've used to arrive at what often seem like out-of-the-box ideas that actually work.
Step one, they emphasized, is to define the problem — something that often is not as obvious as it might appear to be.
Nottingham used the example of Dyson vacuum cleaners. Inventor John Dyson realized, wisely and early on, that his real challenge wasn't to build a better vacuum cleaner, Nottingham said.
"He was trying to remove small particles from the air," Nottingham explained — but without relying on filtering bags that would need to be replaced frequently. He didn't find his answer by looking at or thinking about other vacuums, though.
Step two of the process is to identify known solutions to similar problems. Dyson found the solution he needed in an entirely different industry.
"Dyson asked, 'How do sawmills do this when they have to control dust?,'" Nottingham said, noting that Dyson quickly learned that sawmills remove dust from the air by spinning the air and letting centrifugal force take the dust away.
Step three is to adapt and apply the solution to the new problem. This is where the structure and discipline often take the fore.
"After about 142 prototypes, he had his new vacuum," Nottingham said of Dyson.
Advocating for the strategy generally, Nottingham and Duersch said the same approach can and has been applied to other product-development challenges.
But perhaps most notably for this group, the strategy also works well when trying to apply biomimicry, which is imitating nature to solve a human engineering challenge.
For example, the no-drip cans that Sherwin-Williams uses for paints were inspired by a calla lily and the way the shape of the flower helps it to funnel water, Nottingham said.
Bombardier beetles provided the inspiration for the design of Smart Mouth oral hygiene products. The containers for those products must keep two substances separate until the tube is squeezed, and the beetle does something similar, Nottingham said.
The ways that butterfly wings change color in the sun led to improvements in solar panels, Duersch said, while Boeing copied some of the characteristics of bird wings when it designed its 787 Dreamliner planes.
Nottingham and Duersch said they've learned to look increasingly to nature for the answers to human problems.
"Nature has spent 4 billion years solving everything," Nottingham said.
So, instead of just engineers, should companies also look to hire biologists? That was a question the audience had at the end of the presentation.
"Not necessarily," Duersch said. "But it doesn't hurt."